Perhaps the greatest intellectual leap Roudinesco requires of her
anglophone readers is to entertain, at least temporarily, the notion
of ‘continental’ philosophy as a means to combat social ills. Because
all our problems are caused by fascism and reification, they can be
cured through the practice of the kind of philosophy represented by
the generation of postwar Freudo-Marxist philosophes engagés, and
characterised by a categorical refusal ‘to serve the project to
normalise the human being’. Her six chapters are not overviews or
introductions to the philosophers in question. Roudinesco concentrates
on one text per philosopher, and it is a strength of the book that she
often chooses relatively little-known texts by these much discussed
writers.